Power analysis attack resilient block cipher implementation based on 1‐of‐4 data encoding

Side‐channel attacks pose an inevitable challenge to the implementation of cryptographic algorithms, and it is important to mitigate them. This work identifies a novel data encoding technique based on 1‐of‐4 codes to resist differential power analysis attacks, which is the most investigated category of side‐channel attacks. The four code words of the 1‐of‐4 codes, namely (0001, 0010, 1000, and 0100), are split into two sets: set‐0 and set‐1. Using a select signal, the data processed in hardware is switched between the two encoding sets alternately such that the Hamming weight and Hamming distance are equalized. As a case study, the proposed technique is validated for the NIST standard AES‐128 cipher. The proposed technique resists differential power analysis performed using statistical methods, namely correlation, mutual information, difference of means, and Welch's t‐test based on the Hamming weight and distance models. The experimental results show that the proposed countermeasure has an area overhead of 2.3× with no performance degradation comparatively.